Salomè Voegelin: "Sonic possible worlds and the desire for philosophical collaborations across an unmeasurable time"

This keynote takes the form of a curatorial performance, that is, it does not deliver a paper but performs ideas by playing sounds and reciting poetry, by reading texts and proposing text-scores, by moving and standing still, to bring art, and its theorising into simultaneity, not to know systematically but to generate how we might know contingently from everything at once. This seems important to me particularly in relation to Susan K. Langer for whose philosophy I have a complex appreciation: admiring her identification of the problems of art theory in the 1940s, and her motivation to do things otherwise, while disagreeing with her sense that we can or should know art in a scientific way, particularly in the 1940s. Inspired by this conflict, this keynote as curatorial performance engages the possibility of a co-generated philosophy and art. Recognising our desire for connections, which motivates a cross-time collaboration, and produces plural understandings of what we consider useful, relevant and real. To do so, this curatorial performance turns to sound and engages the philosophy of sonic possible worlds: the imaginary of a plural world of invisible slices, all real simultaneously and legitimised in experience rather than through a singular and calculable world. It does so to discuss the aesthetics of a relational everything-at-once from which objectivity loses its distance and gains responsibility for what we hear not as outcome but as process, generating the work and the world in an unmeasurable time. And that is where I hope to re-meet Langer, in 2026, in the studio, without searching for scientific rigour but co-generating the possible impossibility of the work and the world: to see the actual and hear the possible expand its vision. Link: www.salomevoegelin.net. Portrait by Angelina Nikolayeva.